Chavez dead

[rich]

the big question is whether he left in place to further what he stood
for. problem with charismatic narcissists. they usually don't.

oh, the Colombians hated Chavez, too

rich

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:47 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greg Palast airing some insights about Chavez, front and center at his site:
>
> http://www.gregpalast.com/
>
>
> sizable quote (fair usage, one hopes)
>
> On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and
> flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro
> Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of
> the nation's Chamber of Commerce, declared himself President of
> Venezuela – giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate
> takeover."
>
> U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his
> hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the
> self-proclaimed "President" and the leaders of the coup d'état.
>
> Bush's White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, "democratically
> elected," but, he added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred
> not by just the majority of voters." I see.
>
> With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the Presidential Palace
> in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona, the Pretend
> President from Exxon returned his captive Chavez back to his desk
> within 48 hours. (How? Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film,
> expanding on my reports for BBC Television. You can download it for
> free for the next few days.)
>
> Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the
> bloated royalties of the oil companies. It's what he did with that oil
> money that drove Venezuela's One Percent to violence.
>
> In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is
> generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While
> doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing
> her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed
> down the hill to the "ranchos," the slums above Caracas, where shacks,
> once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes
> of cinder blocks and cement.
>
> "He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of
> course." She was disgusted by "them," the 80% of Venezuelans who are
> negro e indio (Black and Indian)—and poor. Chavez, himself negro e
> indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela's history, shifted the oil
> wealth from the privileged class that called themselves "Spanish," to
> the dark-skinned masses.
>
> While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into a
> local, Arturo Quiran, a merchant seaman and no big fan of Chavez. But
> over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,
>
>     "Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez,
> there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The ‘oil boom' we called
> it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn't see it."
>
> But then came Hugo Chavez, and now the poor in his neighborhood, he
> said, "get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines;
> education also. People who never knew how to write now know how to
> sign their own papers."
>
> Chavez' Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the
> poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who
> told me, "We are no longer an oil colony," went further…too much
> further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.
>
> Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions – and unused land by
> the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of
> plantation owners squatted. Chavez' congress passed in a law in 2001
> requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program
> long promised by Venezuela's politicians at the urging of John F.
> Kennedy as part of his "Alliance for Progress."
>
> Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn't like that one bit. In
> retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin
> and fired all the workers. Chavez seized Heinz' plant and put the
> workers back on the job. Chavez didn't realize that he'd just squeezed
> the tomatoes of America's powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz'
> husband, Senator John Kerry, now U.S. Secretary of State.
>
> Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn't give a damn.